April 2011

THIS WEEKEND, whilst relaxing at one of the numerous vineyard cellar doors we enjoy here in the Adelaide Hills, I stumbled across a post written many months ago by my personal comms guru, Shel Holtz. The article was about an example of the power of HTML5 (the next specification of web coding) that we communicators […]

MY FELLOW Adelaidians Sarah, Jason and Mal have just released their first podcast. Episode 001 of the Communication Junction is now available on iTunes and via their website, and a cracking first episode it is, too. They look at communication agencies from the perspective of clients and subtly ask if some Adelaide agencies are lying […]

Yea, the future of bookmarking site Delicious is secure! Delicious is an essential part of my workflow and the possibility that it was going to languish and die under Yahoo!’s new business direction caused huge conniptions and ripples throughout the online communities on Twitter, Facebook and other parts of the interwebs. If you’ve never used […]

MY FRIENDS at Ragan are putting together a great webinar on how to make hospital videos that enthral employees and tell compelling patient stories. If only the hospitals of Australia would let their communication specialists take advantage of such webinars… [sigh] Even if you’re on a tight budget, you’ll find out how to produce higher […]

BCR080 : Wed 20th April 2011 Ok, I realise it should be "around which", not "around what"… Consider me slightly distracted — I *was* driving at the time [smile]. A short video asking if you and your organisation were considering hiring professional analysts to look at how you converse with your audiences. You can […]

Coincidence or not? You decide. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. A talk being organised by ‘Advantage SA’ about social media has the following promo graphic: Note how the title of the talk closely resembles the title of my recently-published report for Ark Group: Then, to add insult to injury, the ‘Advantage SA’ people […]

Ragan have written a great piece on the five essential metrics you should be tracking via Facebook Insights. In essence, the five areas are: Tab views; External referrals; Post feedback; Monthly active users; and Page views. Raganite Arik Hanson gives great detail on ‘why’ you should be tracking those metrics over on Ragan’s PR Daily. […]

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Recommended reading

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Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John Havens.A belter of a book and a 'must read' addition to any communicator's bedside reading table if they are serious about introducing social media into their communication plans. It includes a fabulous chapter on transparency and business (hint: you want to photocopy it and give it to your CEO!)

Qualitative Communication Research Methods by Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor.Not just a book for academics, it's chock-full of great ideas on how to effectively and efficiently research your employees, customers, the marketplace and other stakeholders

The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein.
A fabulous book that gives a clear, clean overview of what Twitter is and WHY you should be engaging with it. THEN it goes into depth with so many tips and ideas that they should have sold the book for twice the price!

Practical SEO Copywriting: a ‘must get’ book. My mate Glenn Murray has written a bottler of a new book on search engines and copywriting.

In a cunning twist of bizarre nomenclature, he’s titled it Practical SEO Copywriting. The cheeky little fox! It’s a DIY guide to writing online copy for both human readers AND for that 400kg gorilla we lovingly call ‘Google’.

The danger, Glenn quite rightly …err …writes is that focusing too much attention on all of the supposed SEO ‘tricks of the trade’ will make your copy all but unreadable by the human brain. You know, all that stuff bandied about by the so-called SEO (search engine optimisation) experts: keyword frequency, exact string versus individual words scattered across the page, page length, alt tags, header tags, and so on.

Not that this stuff isn’t important – it all is, and more besides – but Glenn argues persuasively that by far more important is the ability to write copy that people will actually want to read – and link to!

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